It is a 24-item scale that measures change along four scales of student career awareness and planning, along with open-response items about specific schooling intentions and career aspirations. Four scales are Concern, Curiosity, Confidence, and Consultation.
A review of relevant literatures led to the construction of a self-report instrument designed to measure two subtypes of student engagement with school: cognitive and psychological engagement. The psychometric properties of this measure, the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI), were assessed based on responses of an ethnically and economically diverse urban sample of 1931 ninth grade students. Factor structures were obtained using exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) on half of the dataset, with model fit examined using confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) on the other half of the dataset. The
Style Engineers is a program designed for young girls who love fashion as much as we do! We think the real magic of fashion is how science, technology, engineering, and mathematicsare part of the process of fashion design. On this site, you will find a series of activities designed to explore the science and technology of fashion.
Evaluators are frequently asked to assess the effectiveness of school programs implemented to improve academic achievement. School connectedness has been shown to be directly related to academic achievement and is therefore of interest to evaluators. The construct of school connectedness has been shown to consist of 3 elements: connectedness to adults in schools, connectedness to peers, and connectedness to the school. This paper reports the psychometric properties and factor analyses findings from a School Connectedness Scale (SCS) given to adolescents in 2 very different high schools in the
This study examines an out-of-school time program targeting elementary-aged youth from populations that are typically underrepresented in science fields (primarily African-American, Hispanic, and/or English Language Learner participants). The program aimed to foster positive attitudes toward science among youth by engaging them in growing plants hydroponically (in water without soil). Participants’ attitudes toward science, including anxiety, desire, and self-concept, were examined through pre-post survey data (n = 234) over the course of an afterschool program at three separate sites. Data
This article presents the curricular framework for a social justice driven STEM curriculum (i.e., STEMJ) within an out-of-school time program for Boston Public high school students (i.e., College Bound) at Boston College. Starting with a discussion of the authors’ ideological positionality within critical social justice discourses, the authors share how Bronfenbrenner’s (1994) General Ecological Model provides a conceptual framework for operationalizing social justice inquiry with and through STEM. Positioning this curriculum within the College Bound program’s overall design gives readers a
Discourse about girls and women of color in technology has followed the familiar path of using a single-unit analysis to explain disparity. Consequently, approaches to “motivate” girls of color overemphasize gender and engage in technological fetishization without fully considering how race, gender, class, and technology are co-constituted. Drawing on critical feminist theory, social justice education, and science and technology studies, this essay offers a critique of neoliberal approaches to technology education for girls of color and provides a broad overview of the conceptual catalysts
First, this paper argues that applications of SCOT in feminist science and technology studies (STS) have largely focused on analyzing how gender and technology are coproduced, resulting in lack of scholarship that examines the mutually constitutive relationship between technology, gender and other intersecting identity categories, such as race and class. Second, this paper argues that an intersectional view of technology can dismantle the language of objectivity deeply embedded in technological artifacts by revealing how gender, race, and class are integral components of “the social shaping of
Data gathered from 325 middle school students in four U.S. states indicate that both male (p < .0005, RSQ = .33) and female (p < .0005, RSQ = .36) career aspirations for being a scientist are predictable based on knowledge of dispositions toward mathematics, science and engineering, plus self-reported creative tendencies. For males, strong predictors are creative tendencies (beta = .348) and dispositions toward science (beta = .326), while dispositions toward mathematics is a weaker (beta = .137) but still a significant (p < .05) predictor. For females, significant (p < .05) predictors ordered
This article and my career as an educational researcher are grounded in two fundamental assumptions: (a) that research and practice can and should live in productive synergy, with each enhancing the other, and (b) that research focused on teaching and learning in a particular discipline can, if carefully framed, yield insights that have implications across a broad spectrum of disciplines. This article begins by describing in brief two bodies of work that exemplify these two fundamental assumptions. I then elaborate on a third example, the development of a new set of tools for understanding and